Cruz's outsiders topped Dewhurst's Texas support in Senate race

FILE - In this June 8, 2012 file photo, Texas Senate Candidate Ted Cruz arrives for a Texas Federation of Republican Woman luncheon during the Texas Republican Convention in Fort Worth, Texas. The tea party candidate for U.S. Senate has come a long way since he kicked off his campaign more than a year ago with seemingly no chance of competing against the mainstream GOP front-runner in the race, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File)

AUSTIN — David Dewhurst had many of Texas’ brightest political stars in his corner for his U.S. Senate campaign, from Republican Gov. Rick Perry to baseball icon Nolan Ryan. The lieutenant governor’s endorsement list read like a directory of statewide offices: comptroller, land commissioner, agricultural commissioner, a railroad commissioner and a parade of state senators.

Ted Cruz countered with outside firepower, tea party superstars such as U.S. Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Kentucky’s Rand Paul; talk show personalities Glen Beck and Sean Hannity; and even former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who roared into suburban Houston five days before Texas’ runoff election to help put Cruz over the top.

In the end, big names and big dollars from faraway places generated a fervor Texas’ home-turf big guns could not. The state famous for the 1830s Texas Revolution-era motto “Come and Take It” let political outsiders do just that — overwhelmingly choosing Cruz as the Republican nominee to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.

The Cruz victory was perhaps the biggest achievement yet for national conservative groups that have poured large amounts of cash into other campaigns across the country in hopes of reshaping America’s political landscape. And it could be a sign of more to come in key future races — even where the odds are stacked against them.

“There’s no doubt you’ll see it again,” said Chris Chocola, president of the Washington-based free-market advocacy group Club for Growth, which spent $5.5 million backing Cruz, it’s largest investment to-date in one race.

In Texas, Cruz got still more funding and volunteer support from the Tea Party Express, ex-Texas U.S. Rep. Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund.

They successfully cast Dewhurst as a moderate — even though he spent nine years as lieutenant governor presiding over some the most-conservative legislative sessions in Texas history.

Chocola called Club for Growth’s support of Cruz “in every way the steepest hill we’ve ever taken on” because Dewhurst “was not a reviled character” who was easy to vilify like other entrenched Republicans the group had targeted.

“It was harder in almost every respect,” he said. “And that fact that you had to educate people on why they shouldn’t vote for Dewhurst, we started at much lower levels than some of those other races.”

But a closer look at the race reveals it wasn’t so much a question of outsiders trouncing Texan political muscle as it was voters’ angry rebuke of politics as usual — even the homegrown kind. Dewhurst’s embracing of the GOP Texas establishment reinforced the idea that he was part of the status quo, while Cruz and his band of out-of-state champions seized the insurgency mantle and clobbered the lieutenant governor with it.

“It was less a ‘Texas vs. the rest of the country’ race and it was instead establishment versus grassroots,” said Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston. “The Dewhurst group, albeit Texans, were seen as the establishment.”

Added Austin-based political strategist Bill Miller: “This was an anti-incumbent vote and everyone who endorsed Dewhurst was an incumbent, so beware.”

The owner of a lucrative energy company, Dewhurst lent his campaign $24.5 million — though he used contributions to pay back at least $5.5 million of that. His ads dismissed Cruz as a Washington-trained lawyer who would be co-opted by his “D.C. Insider” benefactors.

But that backfired because it was hard to paint Palin — who quit before finishing her gubernatorial term — and other rhetorical bomb-throwers as champions of politics-as-usual. Miller said that “Cruz was viewed as the outsider, and trying to sell him as an insider was lunacy.”

Still, the Texas roots of Dewhurst’s campaign ran deeper than simple endorsements or ads. The lieutenant governor turned to a key architect of Perry’s unsuccessful Republican presidential bid, political strategist Dave Carney, and brought in former Perry spokesman Mark Miner. Carney said of Tuesday’s result, “I don’t think there’s any way to say it was endorsements, good or bad.”

Cruz, by contrast, was fond of saying that the political insiders in the Texas Capitol would be just as scared of him as Washington Democrats. Asked if he would be beholden to those who helped get him elected, Cruz said, “The groups that supported me in this race are not looking for special favors.”

The longest-serving solicitor general in Texas history, Cruz had not previously run for political office yet is the strong favorite to beat Democrat Paul Sadler in November. A Harvard-trained lawyer, Cruz seemed an unlikely grass-roots hero. But the son of a Cuban immigrant who cuts a spellbinding stage presence, Cruz got tea party activists energized by talking up the need to slash government spending and defend gun ownership rights.

Jones said out-of-state support helped Cruz more than past conservative, insurgent candidates in other states because it allowed Cruz to respond to attack ads quickly and kept Dewhurst from framing the race on Cruz’s lack of experience.

“Without the outside support in this race, Ted Cruz would not have been able to beat David Dewhurst,” Jones said. “It was indispensable.”